Uncomplicated
by Iellix
Summary: Life was less complicated in the Cretaceous.


Okay, so I lied. There's more fic in me yet. This one was floating around in my head for about two weeks before I decided to write it. I guess I needed to write something a lot more light-hearted than 'The Price to be Paid'. Maybe one day I'll get up off my butt and write a proper full-chaptered story.

Disclaimer: I do not claim ownership of any of the 'Primeval' characters. I only borrow them for my own personal sadistic amusement.

o…o

_Thud._

_Thump._

_CRASH!_

Abby only vaguely hears it, loud enough to be registered through the cottony fog of sleep but not loud enough to fully wake her up.

"Owch! Christ all-fucking-mighty!"

It's a whisper-yell, but it _does_ wake her up, and she sits up just as the bedroom door swings closed and she sees the light leaking in from across the hall. She can hear Connor trying to be quiet in the bathroom, because somehow Connor always manages to be louder when he's trying _not_ to be. She can hear him padding barefoot on the tile, hear the water running, hear him rummaging through the cabinets and shelves, hear him muttering under his breath.

She gets out of bed and grabs for a t-shirt, one of his that she picked up off the floor. She doesn't know why she's bothering, since he's seen her in her knickers before. Far less, too. Since they've been back from the Cretaceous it's been like a honeymoon. Scared and alone and trapped so many millions of years in the past, they stumbled into each other's arms. It was a weird time and place to turn their sexual tension into romance, but they did it anyway. The one place they were scared to tread in their own time became the only place they felt safe during their time trapped in the distant past. Now that they're back they can have all the worry-free sex they want, which frankly is a _lot_ because they couldn't do it in the Cretaceous. The last thing Abby wanted was to get knocked up eighty million years before her ancestors were sperm, so they did everything _but._

She pulls the 'Wolverine' t-shirt on—that she knows the character is an indicator that she's lived with Connor for way too long, but strangely she can't bring herself to care—and crosses the hall to the bathroom. Nancy and Sid look up lazily and uninterestedly from their basket and she stoops low to pat their blocky heads as she passes.

Connor is wearing his 'Knights-Who-Say-Ni' boxers and is leaning into the mirror, squinting thoughtfully at his reflection.

"Hey," she says as she steps forward. She touches his arm gently and he jumps. "You okay?"

He looks at her through the mirror. He's holding a wad of paper towel against his face. "Oh. Hi. Sorry, did I wake you?"

"S'okay. I've become a light sleeper since… you know."

"Me too."

Living millions and millions of years in the past, they couldn't afford to sleep through the noises around them; any little crackling twig or rustle could be something trying to turn them into dinner, so they'd become extremely light sleepers, prepared to fight or flee at the slightest noise. They've only been back now for a month so they haven't completely readjusted to modern life yet.

"Are you okay?" She asks again.

He nods but doesn't look away from the mirror, so she pulls herself up to sit on the countertop next to him and puts her fingers on his cheek, making him turn his head. She sees the blood starting to seep through the paper towels he's holding next to his eye. Abby gasps.

"What did you _do?"_

"It's nothing," he says, shaking his head and batting her hand away. This is different, too, because not too long ago Connor would have milked any injury for all it was worth, claiming to be at death's door from a paper cut just in hopes that she'd pay attention to him.

"Connor," she says sternly. She reaches for him again and this time he doesn't bat her hands away. She moves his bloody wad of towel and reveals the bashed cheek and the cut near his eyebrow that's bleeding quite a lot for how small it is. "What happened?"

He turns red.

"I fell out of bed," he admits in a whisper. "Hit your bloody nightstand on my way down, didn't I?"

The snort of laughter escapes her before she can control and suppress it; she slaps her hand over her mouth. "I'm sorry," she says quickly. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to laugh."

"S'all right. I'd laugh, too, if it wasn't bleeding."

Abby gets off the counter and finds their first-aid kit—which is easy to find because it gets a lot of use with them—and makes him sit down on the edge of the tub. She stands over him, astride his legs, and gently cleans the wound with some cotton wool and hydrogen peroxide and he hisses in pain as it stings him but he doesn't pull away and doesn't complain.

"God, this is embarrassing," he says as she puts a bandage on his cut.

"Why? I've seen you get hurt before."

"It's the principle of the thing."

"How so?" She asks, packing up the first-aid kit and putting it back under the sink.

"I slept up a tree for a year!" He says. "I survived in a world where there're T-rex and raptors and all kinds of big nasty predators! And Helen Cutter! I come back here and I'm gonna snuff it falling out of bed like a three-year-old and braining myself on a table."

She knows he's said it that way to make her laugh, and laugh she does, resting her forehead against his and wrapping her arms around his shoulders.

"It'd be horrifyingly embarrassing, all things considered."

"Oh, Connor."

He settles his hands on her hips and gives her a little peck on the lips. He pulls back a little bit before deciding he wants more, and he kisses her again a little harder. His arms move up and wind around her waist, pulling her right into his lap. She pushes against him and he lets her.

And then they forget they're sitting on the edge of the tub and he goes back too far on the edge and falls in and she tumbles in on top of him. They stumble up and into sitting positions in the dry tub and start to laugh. It feels good to laugh—they've learned to use it as a survival technique, to see everything silly and laugh at it. It kept them from taking things too seriously when they were trapped. It kept them alive.

They smother their giggles in each other's shoulders until they quiet.

"Not your night, is it?" She asks.

He shrugs. "I dunno. I like where it ended up." Then he grins cheekily, a rakish little look that would have looked out of place on Connor a year ago and that makes a delicious little chill run up her spine.

She leans in and bites his ear and lips his neck, and untangles herself from him and climbs out of the tub.

They're both wide awake and neither of them feels like going back to bed yet so they shuffle into the kitchen for something to eat. Rex is sleeping on top of the fridge, getting nice and warm from the motor. He chirrups sleepily and looks at his humans, then decides they're not worth losing sleep over and goes back to sleep.

Connor picks at his leftover Chinese takeaway with a fork, more concerned with mangling it than eating it, which is weird for him because Connor is more food-motivated than any dog.

"What's wrong?" She asks. "Something's bothering you."

"You'll think it's weird."

Abby quirks an eyebrow at him, because what could he _possibly_ say or do that she'd think was weird? She chases dinosaurs for a living and her boyfriend is a comic-book sci-fi dork. She can't afford to think _anything _is 'weird'.

He seems to pick this up and sighs. "I think I miss it. Living in the Cretaceous."

It takes her by surprise. "You do? Really?"

Nod.

"Why?"

He picks a little more into his carton of sweet and sour chicken, his face crinkled and his eyes blankly staring ahead, an expression she knows means he's turning something over and over in his mind.

"Life was less complicated there," he says finally. "I mean… there was less _to_ it. Things were more basic. There was no Arc and no anomaly project. No bills, no mobiles going off every ten seconds. Didn't have to worry about anything more basic than just surviving. I mean, yeah there was always a good chance we could end the day passing through the digestive systems of big angry dinosaurs—"

She giggles and he reaches across the counter to take her hand.

"But it wasn't bad, you know? Just… you, and me. Uncomplicated. Now we're back here, it feels… I dunno. It's hard to get out of that basic survival mindset. Like it's gonna be harder to learn how to live here again than it was learning to live _there."_ He frowns. "Does that make any sense?"

Over the years she's come to appreciate Connor's occasional episodes of the philosophical. It doesn't happen often, but when it does it always manages to surprise her. She hasn't thought about it, but now that he's mentioned it she supposes he's right—life in the Cretaceous was infinitely simpler than here. They just had to eat and keep the fire going and _survive,_ from one day to the next. There were no plans for next week and no worrying about the future because for them 'the future' extended no further than the following day. Having their entire lives reduced to something so simple and fundamental changed how they looked at everything.

She supposes she misses it, too.

"I'm not saying I wanna pull a Helen Cutter and trade in my life for an all-access tour of prehistory. It just puts things into perspective is all. Things I used to think were important just… _aren't."_

Abby leaves her seat and takes the one next to him. She cups his cheek in her hand and makes him look at her; his eyes are sad.

"Hey. It's okay, you know. Not everything here is complicated." She leans in and kisses him, threads her fingers through his shaggy hair. "This isn't."

"No," he says. "I guess it's not."

She hops down and tugs on his hand. "C'mon. Let's go back to bed."

They snuggle into the blankets together, curled around one another, warm and safe and comfortable and _together._

And that's perhaps the most uncomplicated thing of all.


End file.
